I've been playing interactive fiction since I was eight, when my parents bought me a copy of Zork. I don't think I solved it for a number of years, but the beauty of many of the locations became fixed in my mind, and I would daydream about wandering through the Great Underground Empire when I should have perhaps been studying French. I was never about the puzzles, and though many look back on Zork and other early works as puzzle fests, I look back on how the prose made my imagination wander, how I would read a description and then stop to visualize. I still wish IF was mostly about that, and I suppose in the better works it still is.I lost touch with interactive fiction until I stumbled upon the newsgroups in the autumn of 2001. Since that time, IF has become a fairly big part of my life, and many of my closest friends are fellow enthusiasts. These days, I run a weekly IF gaming group, ClubFloyd, organize the annual IntroComp, and moderate IFMUD. I'm also a writer and fairweather reviewer of games.

From time to time I give a talk entitled If You Can Write, You Can Make Computer Games. In the talk, I compare choice- and parser-based IF from a player perspective and show some of the beginner-level code that can get you started on making a game. Here are the presentation and links to the example game, Cloud Dreaming, in two formats.

From 2003-2017, I was the organizer for IntroComp. I feel it's a fantastic way for authors (particularly *new* authors) to tempt us with ideas and receive some feedback prior to pouring everything into their work. For more information on IntroComp, please visit introcomp.org.

They're interactive. They're fiction. Granted, they're not text based and thus might not be entirely apropos here, but they're closely enough related that I feel this to be the proper place on the site for them.

ClubFloyd was founded on September 2, 2007. The idea behind it is that each week a group of people meet online to cooperatively play a game of interactive fiction.Meetings occur on the ifMUD. If you're new to ClubFloyd, please read the Rules & Instructions before you join us for the first time. If you're totally new to the ifMUD, you should also check out our helpful ifMUD for Beginners page.

ClubFloyd meets every Sunday at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific).
We look forward to seeing you in the Toyshop and Floyditorium on ifMUD!
NB: Meeting time shifts with the US observance of daylight saving time.

We used to be really well-organized and pick games in advance and even invite the author, but these days the group that shows up just decides what they're in the mood to play that day. So, um, come join us this Sunday.
Transcripts are kept for every session, though the site gets updated very sporadically — new transcripts appear in large batches about 1-3 times per year. Have (lots of) patience, grasshoppers!
Also contained within the list below are a smattering of NightFloyd transcripts.
NightFloyd transcripts are denoted by [NF] before the game title.
If you would like to suggest a game for us to play, you can either sign the ClubFloyd Suggestions object in the Toyshop, or you can email me (address in the footer of this page). We do sometimes take requests, and we've even been known to beta test stuff.
A NOTE TO AUTHORS: Most authors write to me to express how useful it was to see how people approached their game, especially as players generally discuss their reaction to the game while they're working through it, but... if you're an author or publisher who would prefer that a transcript of your game not be listed on this site, please let me know using the contact page.
Here are the transcripts of our past game-play sessions (some are rather lengthy and may take time to load, depending on your Internet connection). There are a lot of game transcripts here, as we've been at this a long time, so the easiest way to find the game you're looking for is probably to do a CTRL+F and search by title or author keyword, or search for [NF] if you're specifically looking for NightFloyd transcripts. Alternately, pick a year to see all the transcripts for a given year: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017.
You can also click (and/or consider bookmarking) this link to jump to the most recent transcript(s) in the list.